Museum offers reward for last paper ticket

The Railway Museum in Utrecht wants to add a special item to their collection. Conservator Jos Zijlstra is going on the hunt for the last ever NS paper train ticket that will be printed out fro a machine somewhere in The Netherlands.

The tickets will be printed until 4 a.m. tomorrow morning, but machines using the new system will start replacing the old ones in phases from midnight onwards, meaning it will be very difficult for Zijlstra to find that golden ticket.

The new system will give out new plastic OV chip cards. Zijlstra also doesn't know which machine will be the last one to be replaced by the new system. "We discussed with the NS if they would replace the machine at Utrecht Centraal last especially for us", Zijlstra tells the Algemeen Dagblad.

"Then I will go and stand there at 3:55 a.m", he says. "But the NS says that they cannot technically arrange that, with such a large operation." In any case, the conservator will buy a ticket in the afternoon, so that the museum will at least have a ticket from the last day of the paper ticket era.

The museum has posted an announcement on Facebook, in which they ask travelers to send them their tickets from this coming night. In this way, they could be able to attain the real, very last ticket ever printed out.

"It states on the ticket what time you bought it", Zijlstra says. "So we can see what the last ever ticket bought is that we receive. The buyer of that ticket will get €250 from us."